Student-Centred Rubrics: Cracking the Grading Matrix Code so Your Students Don’t Have To. Part 2

Part 2: Effective Student-Focused Rubric Writing Principles

Here are the Effective Student-Focused Rubric Writing Principles. They can be grouped into three categories:

Language

• Simple
• Positive
• Objective
• Contextualised
• Skills-focused
• Helpfully descriptive
• Transparent: no hidden outcomes
• Depersonalised: About the work, not the student, and growth-oriented (Growth Mindset, Dweck, 1999)

Visually accessibility

• Layout and mode of presentation
• Avoiding the use of justified text

Interaction

• Interaction with the rubric in class to scaffold students’ experience of using the rubric
• Students’ input and feedback

The vision

It’s a chilly, bright March afternoon. Snowdrops are nodding and the promise of Spring is on the breeze. Students are inspired about their upcoming assessment after your seminar in which you graded an exemplar from last year together, using the rubric.

At home, they open up the rubric from their desktop. A column is highlighted, the grade that they are aiming to achieve, phrases are underlined, and annotations have been made.

Your student is focused on and confident in their (and your) clear shared vision of what a submission at that grade looks like. They know what characteristics you look for in that grading band.

You sat together with your fellow markers last month over coffee and re-read, discussed and updated the rubric for this assessment. The grade descriptors reflect your current shared thinking about the characteristics that you all look for in those grading bands. Rubric-writers tell me that ownership of each rubric should be with the marking team, that they need to find the language that is meaningful for them and their students, that ‘it’s their brain on paper’ (a concept supported by Andrade, 2024 (pp.316). Academic judgement plays an important part in our marking, and we need to explore this and articulate it to reach a shared understanding with our fellow markers.

Now that you have written your rubric through the lens of the Principles, your students can use it to inform where to direct their focus. They can produce a piece of work that contains the characteristics that you value. As the rubric tells them what these characteristics are, they can get working to incorporate them and improve on any skills that they are yet to accomplish. The rubric is helpfully descriptive.

The description in the rubric is objective, so instead of saying ‘Reflection is informed by a sophisticated relationship with subject knowledge’ it might say ‘Reflection makes links to relevant, current theory and uses examples from current research and own practice, analysing application and learning.’ Instead of saying ‘Excellent identifying, planning and prioritising of the contextual workload’ it might say ‘The plan identifies and explains limiting factors and outlines and justifies appropriate actions to both mitigate these and prioritise specific areas of activity.’ Students feel informed.

The language is positive where possible, and where not possible, is factual. Instead of saying ‘work is of no merit’, ‘highly insufficient’ or ‘lacks basic communication skills’, it says phrases like ‘no module learning outcomes (MLOs) have been met’, ‘set tasks have not been completed’ and ‘the reproduction of facts, terminology and concepts is frequently inaccurate’. Students feel respected. (Winstone et al, 2016, Värlander, 2008).

The language is de-personalised and growth oriented. Instead of saying ‘student is not able to use technical

language accurately’ it might say ‘there are inaccuracies in the terminology used in this analysis’.

The verbs that you use are more specific than ‘demonstrate’. They are contextualised to your discipline and to this assessment, and skills-focused. A student will always have to do something, whether it’s write in an academic style, speak publicly, appraise, interpret, articulate – the list could go on. We need to crack open every instance of ‘demonstrate’, aided by Bloom’s trusty Taxonomy, to reveal the skill that we want the student to use to demonstrate how they have met the module learning outcome (MLO). We need to make it clear to students early on that they will need to become proficient at this skill to do well in this assessment, so that they have time to learn and practise the skill. We will undoubtedly be assessing the students’ proficiency in this skill, as it will affect the quality of their submission. We therefore need to be aware and transparent about the skills that we are assessing, in order to avoid hidden outcomes. Hidden outcomes are where something is assessed but not taught, or where we are not transparent in the rubric that it will be assessed.

Remember the transparency mantra: If you’re assessing it, you need to teach it. If you’re not teaching it, don’t assess it.

Looking forward to a GenAI-enabled future, skills (over knowledge) are becoming increasingly centred in our students’ graduate portfolio (Francis et al, 2025).

The language in your rubric is simple where possible, to facilitate accessibility for all students, particularly students whose first language is not English. Where not possible, you should include a glossary.

Interaction with the rubric is planned. Experience tells us that students sometimes rush work just before the deadline, so rubrics need to be accessible, emphasised to them, and the process of using them modelled, in preparation for this rush.

We need to find the right words to strike the balance of being descriptive without being prescriptive. We want to achieve ‘informed and clear’ rather than ‘an exercise in ticking boxes’. We also want to keep space for and encourage creativity in our students’ submissions – in all subjects but especially in the breadth of submissions that we welcome in our creativity-based disciplines.

It is at this point that colleagues sometimes realise that their MLOs could do with a tweak here and there. This is ok. In fact, this is great. There will be an opportunity in the future to make these important changes. Re-draft the MLOs where this applies and save these drafts for when you have the opportunity to implement them.

Why invest the effort? Think about the impact!

Here is what we could achieve:

The whole grading scale would be more accessible to all of your students, not only those who have the cultural capital to decipher the rubric.

Students’ confidence would improve, as they would know how to do well – they would feel informed enough to target their focus where it will improve their grade. Students would see their performance improving and receive target-focused feed-forward that aligns with the rubric and outlines clear steps to reach the higher grades.

More transparent and meaningful rubrics would inform marking parity and support the provision of usable feedback.

For your students who have additional challenges to accessing learning, intersecting challenges and/or less cultural capital, the positive effect of these changes will be even more impactful, supporting NTU in its ambition to dismantle barriers to engagement that impact on awarding gaps. This is an important responsibility that we need to be continually working and reflecting on as an HE provider (Sabri (2022).

Take control

Here are some simple actions that you can take to make your rubrics more accessible and useful, support the shift in moving rubric practice forward and dismantle some of these barriers:

• Swap out ‘demonstrates’ for more specific verbs using Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Work in pairs for a subjective-language-spot
• Take a look at my Grade-Based Assessment writing resources on Thrive (NTU Login required) :  
  • Accessible rubric examples
  • ‘How could I say this differently?’ Positive Swaps Quiz
  • Ways for Students to Interact with Rubrics

• Re-read your rubrics, annotating with a focus on these principles
• Book on to my rubric writing workshops to work on your own rubrics in a structured, facilitated session, alongside other NTU colleagues
• Read this chapter ‘What Is Next For Rubrics?’ (Andrade, 2023)
• Consider if using or adapting this glossary of assessment terms would be useful for your students: A Principles of Marketing Glossary (Gonsalves, 2021)

My next steps

I want to build a community of interested colleagues to generate ideas about influencing rubric practice, such as designing valuable resources.

I would like to chat about this with you! If this interests you or if you have an idea to propose, get in touch with me at: diana.debutts@ntu.ac.uk

With special thanks to Ken Liston, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader at Confetti, for his collaboration and sharing his learning on the application of these principles in his classroom.